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She had none of the high-souled chivalry of the Samnite; but she was the heart of Italy, and the point from which Italy must expand. She was hard, tough, and based on the soil; and that soil, as it happened, the laya center, a sort of fire-fountain from within and the unseen. You stood on the Seven Hills, and let heaven and hell conspire together, you could not be defeated.
Rome was a compact state, having the strength of all Latium at its disposal; its subjects might murmur, but they obeyed. The Samnite stock was dispersed and divided; and, while the confederacy in Samnium proper had preserved unimpaired the manners and valour of their ancestors, they were on that very account completely at variance with the other Samnite tribes and towns.
War in Picenum Asculum Besieged And Conquered Subjugation of the Sabellians and Marsians Thus began the second campaign in 665. The insurgents opened it, even before winter was over, by the bold attempt recalling the grand passages of the Samnite wars to send a Marsian army of 15,000 men to Etruria with a view to aid the insurrection brewing in Northern Italy.
Pyrrhus, perceiving with the sharp eye of a soldier the advantages of the Roman manipular organization, had on the wings substituted for the long front of his phalanxes an arrangement by companies with intervals between them in imitation of the cohorts, and perhaps for political no less than for military reasons had placed the Tarentine and Samnite cohorts between the subdivisions of his own men.
Nearly the converse occurred in the case of the sibilants; for while the Etruscan retained the three signs "id:z", "id:s", "id:sh", and the Umbrian rejected the last but developed two new sibilants in its room, the Samnite and the Faliscan confined themselves like the Greek to "id:s" and "id:z", and the Roman of later times even to "id:s" alone.
With still greater energy the extension of the Roman rule was prosecuted in central Italy. As the subjugation of the Aequi and Hernici was the immediate sequel of the first Samnite war, so that of the Sabines followed on the end of the second.
The Italian peasant is not the same in all parts of the country, as is generally supposed; and although the Tuscan, who is constantly brought into familiar contact with his landlord, and acquires a certain pleasant faith in him, grows eloquent upon the conditions of his being, the same is not true of the rougher race that labours in the valleys of the Sabine and the Samnite hills.
Now when we consider that in the oldest abbreviations the distinction between "id:gamma" "id:c" and "id:kappa" "id:k" is still regularly maintained; that the period, accordingly, when the sounds became in pronunciation coincident, and before that again the period during which the abbreviations became fixed, lies beyond the beginning of the Samnite wars; and lastly, that a considerable interval must necessarily have elapsed between the introduction of writing and the establishment of a conventional system of abbreviation; we must, both as regards Etruria and Latium, carry back the commencement of the art of writing to an epoch which more closely approximates to the first incidence of the Egyptian Sirius-period within historical times, the year 1321 B.C., than to the year 776, with which the chronology of the Olympiads began in Greece.
After the Roman generals had agreed to these terms and had given six hundred hostages chosen from the cavalry for their faithful execution besides pledging their own word and that of all their staff-officers on oath to the same effect the Roman army was dismissed uninjured, but disgraced; for the Samnite army, drunk with victory, could not resist the desire to subject their hated enemies to the disgraceful formality of laying down their arms and passing under the yoke.
The Samnite nation, moreover, could not resist the dangerous charm of Hellenic culture; least of all in Campania, where Neapolis early entered into friendly intercourse with the immigrants, and where the sky itself humanized the barbarians.
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